Not Tonight, Sweetie; No Energy

Not Tonight, Sweetie; No Energy

A
Neo-Malthusian Looks at Fossil Fuels and Fertility

The
"fertility opportunity hypothesis" holds that parents want more children when
they perceive forthcoming opportunities for a better life, but have fewer
children if they anticipate hard times ahead. Perceptions of a coming global
oil scarcity could result in population growing less than the UN expects.

The
Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was notorious for the view that "positive
checks"-meaning poverty, famine, and premature mortality-are the only means of
keeping population size in balance with resources. But his second edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population is far
from pessimistic: it develops the idea that "moral restraint" (encompassing
social rules as well as personal decisions) often depresses the fertility rate,
thus slowing or stopping population growth before calamities occur.

Worldwide, the dynamics of
self-restraint are causing fertility rates to fall much more rapidly than
generally anticipated, vindicating Malthus's foresight. Projections of an
ultimate population size of 12 billion have been forgotten. In 2003, the United
Nations offered a middle projection of 8.9 billion as the ultimate peak world
population. A March 2004 report by the U.S. Census Bureau projected a
most-likely scenario of 9.1 billion by 2050, with average fertility below
replacement level and with hotspots of elevated mortality.

My own view is even more
optimistic: world population is unlikely to rise above 8 billion (from
approximately 6.4 billion today), and the fertility rate will fall from the
Population Reference Bureau's 2003 estimate of 2.8 children per woman to below
replacement level within the next dozen years. With population size peaking at
a level lower than either the Census Bureau or the United Nations project, much
excess mortality may be avoided.

Fertility and Opportunity

Why do I
believe this? Because my data show that people faced with real or perceived deprivation typically exercise
reproductive caution. Whether in hunter-gatherer or agrarian societies, or
developing or industrialized countries, intimations of scarcity (with respect
to wants as well as needs) encourage restraint. And in the near term, expensive
fossil fuels could trigger an acute sense of scarcity. Put another way, this fertility opportunity hypothesis proposes
that people usually have as many children as they think they can afford, and
that the motivation to have more or fewer arises from perception of economic
prospects. Perceptions crystallize through comparisons to past experiences or a
reference group.

Where straying above carrying
capacity would terminally threaten life-support systems, individual evaluation of relative well-being often gives way to
rigid, culturally embedded rules. The hierarchical social structure of
indigenous peoples living in the Amazonian blackwater ecosystem is
illustrative. With sparse game, few fish, and nutrient-poor soils, population
size remains in balance with resources because only the few fortunate heirs to
fishery and residential sites expect to marry and reproduce. Defined real
estate rights are unusual in primitive societies but a less restrictive system
might founder as population overshot resources.

The fertility opportunity
hypothesis suggests that rules atrophy, reproductive decisions become
individualized, fertility rates rise, and populations explode when communities
encounter new opportunities, such as those created by potato cultivation in
Ireland around 1740, or by nitrogen fertilizer and foreign aid to
underdeveloped countries during the twentieth century. Self-restraint is not
rediscovered until economic prospects sour.

Anecdotal support for this idea is
plentiful. For example, a Cairo slum dweller says, "We're just surviving....
Certain days we don't eat...I don't understand how people with seven or eight
children survive." Pondering what she would do differently if she were rich, an
Ethiopian mother of five says, "If I were wealthy, say if I had horses and a
better house, I'd have more children." A Russian mother of two who has relied
on abortion to limit family size muses, "I would have had more children if life
were better." Near Mexico City, a Roman Catholic mother of two defends her use
of contraception: "Things are difficult here.... Jobs are hard to come by."

Stronger support can be found in a
number of case histories, several of which I've summarized below:

Rwanda. The Rwandan
population quadrupled between 1950 and 1993. Although designed to help, moves
to virgin land and the agricultural assistance given farmers were arguably not
constructive in the long run because they promoted a frontier mentality,
including idealization of large families. Observes demographer John May, "...the
relative availability of land during the agricultural colonization and
intensification processes might have been conducive to higher fertility
levels."

The fertility rate in 1987, a
decade before Hutu massacred Tutsi, was 8.5 births per woman. By 1992, it was
6.2, a decline of more than two children per woman within five years. This
ostensibly demonstrated the effectiveness of family planning programs launched
some years earlier. As late as 1992, however, only 12.9 percent of married,
reproductive-age women used modern contraceptive methods-hardly sufficient to
account for the two-child decline in the total fertility rate. May suggests
that the actual behavioral change that promoted lower fertility was delayed
marriage.

Rwandans became infused with a new
sense of caution when gains from intensifying agriculture and dispersing the
population ran their course. Subdivision in each generation made family plots
too small-by 1984, 57 percent of holdings were less than one hectare-for their
many uses, including cultivation, pastureland, and fuelwood. Moreover, droughts
increased and marginal land brought into cultivation 20 years earlier was
losing productivity. A pervasive image of limits apparently made family
formation less attractive, inspiring marital and reproductive self-restraint.

Brazil. Referring to a poverty-stricken region of high
effective population density, sociologist George Martine has written, "Brazil's
poorest socioeconomic region, the Northeast, has undergone the fastest
fertility reduction over the last 20 years: there, the TFR [total fertility
rate: roughly, the average number of live births per woman] has fallen from
around 7 in 1970 to 3.7 in 1990." Martine observes that the commonly mentioned
"demographic transition variables," including women's education and participation
in the labor force, did not cause the fertility decline. He suggests that the
underlying mechanism was an unforeseen aspect of modernization: new
expectations set up large sectors of the population for disappointment.

Egypt and Morocco. Philippe Fargues and Youssef
Courbage, studying Egypt and Morocco respectively, suggest that fluctuations in
household economies affect fertility rates. In both countries, flows of widely
distributed new wealth stimulated childbearing. The source (private income or
government-subsidized housing, food, healthcare, and education) appeared not to
matter. Fargue and Courbage concur that modernization-including reductions in
infant mortality, better healthcare, education (especially for women), and
rising standards of living-were not
correlated with declining fertility rates and clearly were not causally related to them. In both countries, economic
retrenchment with increasing disparity between aspirations and reality underlay
the fertility decline. Sustained fertility reduction began when governments
reduced subsidies, women entered the workforce to make ends meet, and the tax
burden on families rose.

In Egypt (which has the longest
history of concern over its expanding population of any Muslim country), Gamal
Abdel Nasser encouraged family planning programs, and fertility declined during
his tenure from 6.7 births per woman in 1960 to 5.0 births in 1970.
Nevertheless, Fargue denies that programmatic family planning efforts caused
the fertility decline. He cites, instead, new pressures coincident with the
economic recession through which Egypt floundered until after Nasser's death.
When Anwar El Sadat came to power in 1973, he encouraged domestic
entrepreneurial activity, emigration, and foreign investment. He also signed a
formal peace treaty with Israel (the Camp David accords) that still brings
Egypt $2.5 billion per year in aid from the United States. This aid, along with
oil revenues and fees for foreign shipping through the Suez Canal, funded
expansion of social programs. Remittances from expatriate Egyptians-which by
the early 1980s amounted to US$5 billion a year, the equivalent of 90 percent
of Egypt's annual export revenues-augmented income in many families.

These dollar flows contributed,
Fargue observes, to "a substantial increase in the standard of living" through
el-Sadat's early years. "Now better off, families could more easily satisfy an
unchanged desire to have numerous offspring." The fertility rate did indeed
spike, rising 30 percent from 1970 to 6.5 births per woman in the early 1980s.

President Hosni Mubarak, successor
after El Sadat was assassinated in 1985, inherited a deteriorating economy and
was soon forced to scale back social programs and subsidies. Awareness that the
historically huge population was causing massive underemployment and shortages
in arable land, food, and water became acute. The eroding standard of living
apparently gave impetus to preferences for smaller family size. Between 1988
and 2003, the Egyptian TFR declined from 5.0 to 3.5 children per woman. The
parallel, downward trends in socioeconomic indicators and fertility rates
support Fargues's contention that, "Egypt's demographic transition has been
driven not so much by economic development as by its hiccups."

Asia. The nine
former "Asian tigers" (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines,
Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) vary greatly but each is modern
and vibrant in at least one primary sector. During late summer of 1997, the
nine tigers temporarily reversed from economic growth to stagnation. The
downward spiral began with a 40-percent currency devaluation in Thailand, and
quickly spread.

In Japan, unemployment rates in
1998 and 1999 rose to their highest level since 1953. Personal bankruptcies in
1999 were 50 percent higher than in 1997 and, as a further sign of falling
incomes, retail sales declined through 1999. In 1998, the Japanese suicide rate
was the highest recorded. Contemplating an uncertain future, a majority of
university students expressed a preference for government as opposed to
private-sector employment.

In print, I predicted that the
economic collapse would cause fertility rates to decline at a faster rate
during the 1997-1999 interval than during preceding two-year intervals.
Fertility was trending downward to varying degree in each country, but I
expected steeper declines. And in fact the percentage decline in the 1997-1999
interval proved more than six times as great as the average of declines in
previous intervals, a statistically significant difference. In contrast, a
comparison group of countries that experienced no particular economic shock
showed random variation in fertility rates.

Nearing Limits?

Regarding
the future, one searches for factors that could have a decisive effect on perception
of economic opportunity and, therefore, fertility rates. My candidate is fossil
fuels.

The availability of energy is one
of the key influences on the evolution of human culture, and some scholars have
even suggested a relationship between energy use per capita and population
size. For 21st-century civilization, oil and gas are unparalleled sources of
energy, and their penetration into the depths of the economy is profound. Not
only is transportation radically dependent on oil; petroleum products are also
the feedstock for myriad industrial and agricultural processes. As pesticides
and fertilizers, petrochemicals are irreplaceable in
high-yield modern agriculture. Physicist Albert Bartlett famously said that
industrialized agriculture uses land to turn oil into food, and economist John
Gever and his colleagues have suggested that by approximately 2020 agriculture
will be recognized as the highest use of fossil fuels.

Colin Campbell, a retired oil
industry geologist and editor of the newsletter for the Association for the
Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), and electrical engineer Richard Duncan were among the
first to write that energy price is a major causal factor in economic growth
rates. Until relatively recently, however, most public discussions were dismissive.
Through the decade of the dot-com bubble-which was favored by very cheap energy
for much of its run-one heard instead of the de-coupling or de-linking of oil
and economic growth.

Smarter business analysts began to
reverse course in late 2002. Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, said that "a rise in the price of
oil reduces real income and real wealth, squeezes profits, and transfers
incomes to oil-producing countries, all of which will be contractionary....
Changes in unemployment have consistently followed changes in the real price of
oil...." His article featured a chart showing higher unemployment rates in
oil-importing countries lagging higher oil prices by two to three years during
the period 1970-2002. Most U.S. recessions since World War II have followed a
period of rising oil prices.

High-priced energy depresses
business, prolonging recessions or stagflation. Farmers reduce
fossil-fuel-based agricultural inputs, substituting organic and no-till
methods. Although these methods are theoretically ideal from the perspective of
sustainable agriculture, the human cost includes smaller crops and pricier food
than with industrial agriculture.

Is such a future upon us? Numerous
geologists, physicists, and engineers (including, but not limited to, Colin
Campbell and his colleagues at ASPO) calculate that a plateau and then decline
in petroleum, natural gas, and liquid natural gas (LNG) production will
commence within five to ten years. In 2002, the executive vice-president of
Exxon-Mobil publicly revealed that oil discovery (the rate of finding new
reserves) peaked in the 1960s. In January 2004, Royal Dutch/Shell shocked
markets by slashing its estimated oil and natural gas reserves by 20 percent,
thereby reducing its reserve life by about one-quarter. Echoing these
revelations, El Paso Gas announced in February 2004, a sharp reduction in its
proven reserves of natural gas.

Depletion in some regions has not
yet manifested itself in lower global production, primarily because swing
producers in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Qatar, have
driven production higher than may be optimal in terms of maximizing total
eventual recovery of oil in the ground. Consumers, too, prefer maximizing
near-term production because it drives down price.

Political perturbations, rather
than producer countries husbanding a resource that has scarcity value, are the
major factors in current pricing. Nevertheless, depletion-driven, higher-priced
energy may be in our future.

This brings us to the data
supporting the connection between the availability of energy and population
trends. The invention of multiple ways to harness the energy in wood and coal
launched the Industrial Revolution and rapid population growth. Fossil fuels
accelerated these trends, with population expanding six-fold during the first
half of the Oil Age (1859 to approximately 2000), according to Richard
Heinberg. Energy economist Vaclav Smil observes that, "Population density
increased substantially in countries with intensive agriculture only after the
use of nitrogen fertilizer became common." After inventions in 1909, synthetic
ammonia-made mostly from natural gas-began replacing natural sources of
nitrogen and now accounts for essentially all inorganic nitrogen inputs to
agriculture.

More specifically, the decades
between 1950 and 1970 saw a near doubling of the per-capita use of industrial
energy worldwide, from 1.03 to 2.04 kilowatts (kW). The rate of increase slowed
in the following two decades, 1970 to 1990, when per-capita energy use
increased from 2.04 to only 2.19 kW. With respect to oil alone, production and
use peaked in the early 1970s at approximately 2.3 liters per person per day.
By 2000, per-capita oil consumption had declined to approximately 1.7 liters
per day.

Trends in world population growth
roughly track the fluctuations in per-capita energy use. Population plotted on
a semi-logarithmic scale yields a curve that bends steeply upward, away from a
straight line, from at least the beginning of the twentieth century until nearly
1970. That is, population size grew at an
accelerating rate so long as petroleum consumption per capita was also rising
rapidly. Between 1965 and 1970, world population growth slowed from
its trajectory of 1.9 percent annually to the lower rate of 1.7 percent. By
2000, it had slowed to 1.4 percent annually. "Population momentum," the
phenomenon that successively larger generations drives birth rates higher even
when individual fertility is low, accounts for a lag between declining
per-capita energy use and decline in the population growth rate.

Coal, nuclear, and renewable energy
sources, combined with increasing efficiencies, may mitigate the effect of a
plateau in oil and gas production. If not, the demographic effects of a
no-growth or declining economy may be profound. Assuming some lag time, which
could be relatively short, Colin Campbell comments that, "...the consequence of
peak oil may be peak people."

Caution: Children

Children
are very costly in energetic terms, so it is to be expected that humans have
evolved to avoid or undo reproductive mistakes. Cautious approaches to
childbearing allow hoarding of resources for the most propitious opportunities,
theoretically maximizing total reproductive success and giving the next
generation a competitive edge.

My data suggest that persons who
perceive improving conditions make expansive reproductive choices, relaxing
prudential behavior and pleasurably anticipating large families. Today's young,
however, largely expect narrowing opportunities. Anticipating difficulty in
providing for children at a personally acceptable standard, they tend to be
cautious about incurring family responsibilities. They avoid childbearing while
single, delay marriage, and space children within marriage.

Choices may narrow rapidly if
certain energy futures materialize. Rising energy prices may cause retrenchment
in living standards. Food surpluses will disappear if growing national
populations raise domestic demand, and price-induced reduction of
petrochemical-based fertilizer and pesticides cut yields. Domestic demand will
usually be satisfied before food is exported unless a severely indebted nation
must sell to survive; export of food needed at home is a recipe for social
unrest. But it is likely that, before these scenarios emerged, the native-born
population and established residents would respond with marked reductions in
their fertility rates. Barring mass immigration, population would begin to
stabilize.

A public that opposes immigration
and practices reproductive self-restraint has embarked already on a promising
adaptation to petroleum depletion. Governments should support-rather than
oppose, as they often do-both aspects of this adaptation. All else equal, a
country with a stable or shrinking population is better positioned to cope with
increasingly expensive energy. Worldwide, a future marked by declining energy
use per capita may be the ultimate driver of population stabilization.

Virginia Deane Abernethy is professor of psychiatry emerita at
Vanderbilt University and the author of Population Politics and Population Pressure and
Cultural Adjustment, which was
the earliest expression of her thesis and will be reissued in paperback in the
spring of 2005.

References
and readings for each article are available at www.worldwatch.org/pubs/mag/.